Letter 13: Bound Fortunes
Letter 13: Bound Fortunes
When it still isn't over
This week, we welcome back our regular contributor Emily Fleming, a veteran and emergency room doctor living in Montana.
I want to take a moment to reiterate the premise of The Learning Curve: We are a newsletter sharing women’s journeys and stories. We hope that you will hear from women you may otherwise not hear from in your day-to-day lives. In the case of today’s letter, you will hear from an ER doctor who is working through the emotions of battling and being on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emily’s letter is a snapshot of where she is right now. This week’s newsletter is a conduit for Emily’s story and experience.
It is not a shocking statement to say that our nation is divided. But I want to encourage all of us to purposefully seek out and foster empathy for our communities. This is an exercise that will require practice. We must train ourselves to see the nuances and gray areas of life, not simply putting those who see things differently in the category of “other.” At the end of today’s letter, you will find a list of resources that emphasize doing this work within ourselves. We have also included links to informative and reliable resources on COVID-19 vaccines.
As Emily wrote to Molly and me as we planned this letter and resources, she wrote, “Want to help your local healthcare workers? Get vaccinated.” Just as Emily would encourage you to get the vaccine, Molly and I want to encourage you to seek out the experts themselves (primary sources) in the fields of healthcare, virology, and epidemiology as you conduct your research. Look to those who are best informed. Seek answers from those who can be trusted.
We appreciate you being here, and we appreciate Emily’s openness and vulnerability. I know you will, too. — Emily Smith
I acknowledge that not a single person has remained unaffected by this pandemic, and we all view our collective circumstance from vastly different views and perspectives. For better or worse, this is mine. — Emily Fleming
“He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I remember the first time I read Joan Didion’s line, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” It was like exhaling after holding my breath for a lifetime. Writing has long been a form of cathartic processing for me. And yet, for nearly a year and a half, I have played the role of emergency physician during a pandemic, and find myself clamming up entirely whenever I sit down to write about it.
At the beginning of the pandemic when healthcare workers were celebrated as heroes, it felt weird to write about my experiences. I was already receiving way more attention than I wanted for just doing my job, and so many others had it much worse than I did.
But very quickly, combatting a global pandemic somehow became, at least in America, a politically partisan issue. I struggled to find a way to communicate in a way that would come across as anything other than partisan, and I worried that the vaccine has become so politicized that it will strike the wrong tone for this letter.
But this gives you a sense of where my head is: my nursing staff is completely beaten down as we are just getting crushed again with COVID. Our hospital beds are full, and unvaccinated people keep coming and coming and coming, sicker and sicker every day.
I remember the fear that overwhelmed me in March 2020, as I stared down a viral enemy that was deadly and relentless.
I feared for my own life as I walked into work, and for the lives of my children every time I walked out of the hospital and back into our home.
I was meticulous about decontaminating myself when I returned home from work, pushing away my children’s hugs until I had stripped down and sanitized everything on my person. It was as heartbreaking as it was terrifying.
This fear was universal among my friends and colleagues in medicine. And yet, we all watched in horror as we were vilified in certain media broadcasts, accused of profiteering and of overstating the dangers of COVID-19. It was an incredible instance of adding insult to injury.
What seemed like an obvious fact to most of us in the medical community—that the virus was deadly and we should institute measures necessary to mitigate it—was labeled conspiratorial by some media outlets and a significant portion of the U.S. population. It was disorienting to watch laypeople and newscasters attempt to discredit science and to see them gain traction and followers as they did so.
It isn’t difficult to understand how this happened. Experts at the CDC and the WHO waffled erratically in their recommendations for masking and social distancing. As a fellow scientist, I knew this waffling to be the result of adapting recommendations to fit new information as it was received.
We learned a tremendous amount about the behavior of this virus, how to treat it, and how to prevent it in a remarkably short period of time. Public health recommendations were bound to change. But for the layperson, this inconsistency raised questions about the competence of these organizations and their ability to effectively lead the public back to a general state of health.
The other day, our emergency department received a lovely gift of snacks with a heartfelt, handwritten card from a local church, thanking us for our service during the pandemic, and ensuring us all that they still remember and appreciate us, even though “we’re on the other side of 2020.” The sentiment expressed brought me to tears.
It was beautiful and considerate, but it was so far off.
We are not on the other side; rather, we are still very much in it. And it brings me to the edge of despair to learn that so many people don’t realize this. So few people are willing to take the actions necessary to move us beyond it or even agree on what those actions are.
It feels like the rest of the nation is arguing about what caused the flood, while those of us in healthcare are still just desperately trying to keep our heads above water.
Now, many months later, I’ve reached a state of despondence. It seems this pandemic may never actually end but will continue to smolder indefinitely. Vaccination rates are too low to truly eradicate the virus, and the vaccine has also become so politicized that it feels hopeless to dare to believe that more people will actually get it. This fact doesn’t stop me from trying to convince anyone and everyone I come across to go and get their jab in the arm, but I have been doing so with less and less conviction as my hopes fade.
I am truly exhausted from sixteen months of fighting this thing, and my empathy wanes as I continue to encounter patients suffering from what is now a vaccine-preventable disease. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
My fallible humanity sometimes gets in the way of me connecting with the human being in front of me. It helps to remember that we’re all just people, doing the best we can.
Our fortunes really are bound up with one another, often much more than we would like to admit. I hope that we can try harder to work together and bring an end to this pandemic. It won’t be easy, but I believe we can do hard things.
“This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another.”
Michelle Obama
5 Things I’ve Learned About Myself Since 2020:
(Each week our writers share their current favorite things, but Emily shared her list recently; so we’re putting a spin on this week’s list.)
I truly feel called to do this work as an emergency physician. I have difficulty imagining doing anything else with my life. I feel incredibly fulfilled by the practice of meeting people on their worst days and finding a way to offer comfort. Even as I walked in fear, I still felt confident I was where I was supposed to be with every step I took into the hospital on the way to every shift.
I can definitively say I am not cut out to be a homeschooling mom. I was homeschooled growing up, and honestly never saw it as a real option for me, given my career choices. Now I can proclaim with confidence that homeschooling is not a choice I will make for myself and my children in the future. No thank you. We would strangle one another.
The mountains called, and we went. We moved our family from Texas to Montana at the end of the summer of 2020, following a long-held dream to live in the mountains. We dared to imagine that our lives could look differently, and took a big leap of faith, moving when only one partner had a job. Best decision we ever made. Our family is thriving here, and the job situation worked itself out. Five out of five stars: highly recommend upending your life and moving across the country on a whim.
My home is a sanctuary for me. Along with everyone else, I spent more time at home in 2020 than I ever had before, and I learned that I love the space I’ve curated there. It is comfortable, welcoming, colorful and calming. I have always valued making my house a home, but it feels more like a gift this year than ever before.
Finding the courage to suck at something new is not always easy. Our move to the mountains has enabled me to try a ton of new activities, most of which I am terrible at doing. Downhill skiing, cross country skiing, fly fishing, and mountain biking were all things I tried this year, with widely varying degrees of success. It has been hard to pick myself up after I quite literally fall repeatedly; an exercise in tenacity, if you will. Some days my pride just can’t take the beating any longer. But some days it feels amazing to be getting out there and trying new things. I’m holding on to those days.
Resources:
In addition to the CDC vaccine information page, here are a couple of other resources for vaccine-related information.
Some evidence-based Instagram accounts we trust include Infectious Disease Specialists Laurel Bristow (@kinggutterbaby) and Jessica Malaty Rivera (@jessicamalatyrivera).
Jessica Malaty Rivera answers a lot of questions about the vaccine’s development and risks in an easy-to-understand format on this episode of the Motherhood Meets Medicine podcast. Here’s a link to the podcast on Apple and on Spotify.
This Google Doc from Laurel Bristow (@kinggutterbaby) is also a helpful, consolidated resource.
Emily Oster (@profemilyoster) is a professor at Brown University, mother, and writer of three data-driven parenting books. Her newsletter Parent Data has also become one of the most trusted resources on navigating parenting during the pandemic.
Additionally, while not a COVID resource, we absolutely must recommend Sharon McMahon’s Instagram account @sharonsaysso for truly unbiased and nonpartisan news and information. She just launched a podcast, and this episode in particular is well worth your time.
With gratitude,
Emily Fleming
P.S. The last few years have been difficult, as Emily writes. What have you learned about yourself during these trying times?
